Inclusivity and Decentralisation of Candidate Selectorates: Factional Consequences for Centre-Left Parties in England, Germany, and the United States

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/10659129221081213
• Published date: 01 March 2023
• Date: 01 March 2023
• Subject Matter: Articles

Article

Political Research Quarterly

2023, Vol. 76(1) 292–307

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DOI: 10.1177/10659129221081213

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Inclusivity and Decentralisation of

Candidate Selectorates: Factional

Consequences for Centre-Left Parties in

England, Germany, and the United States

Mike Cowburn

1

and Rebecca Kerr

2



Abstract

In recent elections, ‘progressives’in centre-left parties have advocated for more democratised processes of candidate

selection. We test whether more inclusive and decentralised selectorates align with highe r numbers of progressive

candidates nominated in national legislative elections by centre-left parties across three advanced western democracies

between 2017 and 2021. In the Labour Party, more centralised selectorates aligned with higher numbers of progressives

selected. For the SPD, we report null f‌indings, likely due to additional incentives for factional co-operation in a multi-

party system. In our most decentralised case, the Democratic Party, selection of progressives was congruent with district

partisanship rather than selectorate inclusivity, with progressives more commonly selected in safe rather than com-

petitive or unfavoured districts. This relationship was not present in our other cases. These f‌indings highlight the

importance of the decentralisation dimension for the factional allegiance of legislative candidates nominated.

Keywords

social democratic parties, intra-party, factions, candidate selection, primaries

Introduction

Nomination of legislative candidates has long been

considered among the most important functions of po-

litical parties, with consequences for party ownership

(Schattschneider 1942, 101), control (Ranney 1981, 103),

and as a def‌ining feature ‘that universally distinguishes

parties from other political organizations’(Sartori 1976,

64). Indeed, recent theorizing about parties places nom-

inations at the heart of what parties are (Bawn et al. 2012).

Candidate selections reveal intra-party dynamics, as ‘an

acid test of how democratically they conduct their internal

affairs’(Gallagher 1988, 1). Despite widespread ac-

knowledgement of the importance of nominations, the

empirical consequences of variance in the rules of se-

lection remain poorly understood, particularly in terms of

the factional allegiances of legislative candidates selected.

We test these consequences for the Labour Party in

England, the German Sozialdemokratische Partei

Deutschlands (SPD) and the Democratic Party in the

United States, using the spatial and temporal variation

present within each case. These parties are three of the

oldest of their kind, whose trends and intra-party

dynamics resonate to other advanced western democra-

cies. We contend that each party has a bi-factional

structure—with comparative moderate and progressive

1

factions—which structures intra-party conf‌lict. We con-

sider factional aff‌iliations of candidates for national

legislative off‌ice based on variation in selection processes.

In these parties, the factions have competing views on the

role of intra-party democracy, meaning the candidate

selection process is itself a site of factional conf‌lict.

In recent decades, candidate selection has targeted by

reformers in centre-left parties, often aligned with the

progressive faction, to foster connection with voters (Bille

2001;Totz 2011) in response to electoral decline and

falling membership numbers (Benedetto, Hix, and

1

Graduate School of North American Studies, Freie Universit¨

at Berlin,

Berlin, Germany

2

School of HAPP, Queen’s University Belfast, Belfast, UK

Corresponding Author:

Rebecca Kerr, School of HAPP, Queen’s University Belfast, 25

University Square, Belfast BT71NN, UK.

Email: rkerr29@qub.ac.uk

Mastrorocco 2020). These parties have been marred by

claims that they are out-of-touch elites who have aban-

doned core party values, traditionally understood as a

struggle of solidarity (Müller 1999). Contemporarily, a

vigorous debate has emerged about electoral revitalisation

(Abou-Chadi and Wagner 2019,2020); should parties

pursue left-leaning movement-based politics—as advo-

cated by politicians such as Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie

Sanders—or attempt to reignite their Third Way successes

by adopting comparatively moderate policy positions? A

key component of these debates has been the extent to

which parties should ‘bring the members back in’(Hopkin

2001) as part of the candidate selectorate; those re-

sponsible for selecting candidates. Given recent calls for

greater intra-party democratisation across these parties,

how do selection processes relate to the ideological

identity of legislative candidates nominated? More spe-

cif‌ically, given that these demands largely originate from

progressives in these parties, to what extent do more

‘open’selectorates correspond to greater numbers of

progressive-aligned candidates being selected for national

legislative off‌ice? Given the differences between our cases

we focus on within-case variation.

Existing literature conceives two main dimensions of

selectorate openness: inclusivity and decentralisation

(Gallagher 1988;Hazan and Rahat 2010;Hopkin 2001;

Katz and Mair 1995;Lundell 2004;Rahat and Hazan

2001;Ranney 1981). In the Labour Party, groups such as

Momentum have advocated for greater selectorate in-

clusivity as a mechanism to recruit more diverse MPs

(Parker 2018). In the SPD, recent democratisation has also

resulted in greater involvement in candidate selection by

ordinary members (Detterbeck 2016) with reforms at the

national level, introduction of primaries in Land (state)

elections, and efforts to include even non-party members

in the process (Detterbeck 2013). In the U.S., the highly

inclusive and decentralised primary system has been

blamed for producing extreme candidates and contrib-

uting to polarization in Congress (Brady, Han, and Pope

2007;Kamarck, Podkul, and Zeppos 2016;Schumer

2014). Despite this criticism, states have continued to

enact reforms making selectorates more inclusive, such as

shifting from closed to open primaries. In each case, the

inclusivity dimension is the focus of reform efforts, with

comparatively little attention given to decentralisation.

We consider the relative importance of inclusivity and

decentralisation in nominating progressive candidates

within our cases. To do so, we use the framework es-

tablished by Reuven Hazan and Gideon Rahat (Hazan and

Rahat 2010;Rahat and Hazan 2001) and applied else-

where in the literature (e.g. Shomer 2014;Spies and

Kaiser 2014).

Given the contemporary prominence of progressives

demanding more internal party democracy, we restrict our

analysis to recent variation in candidate selection pro-

cesses. We analyse the period from 2017 to 2021, in-

cluding the last two national legislative elections in each

case. We select these parties due to their prominence in the

literature on social democratic parties, their inf‌luence on

centre-left parties globally, the countries’different elec-

toral and party systems, and their common position as the

leading exponants of Third Way politics. We also note a

paucity of comparative intra-party literature including the

U.S. alongside European cases.

Our research question focuses on the alignment be-

tween inclusivity and decentralisation of legislative

candidate selectorates, and the rate of progressive can-

didates selected in three centre-left parties. Theoretically,

our expectations are derived from John May’s‘special law

of curvilinear disparity’(1973). Greater inclusivity and,

especially, centralisation of Labour selectorates aligned

with the nomination of greater numbers of progressive

candidates under Corbyn, in line with theoretical literature

suggesting that inclusivity without decentralisation can

strengthen the control of party leadership over candidate

outcomes (Cross and Katz 2013;Hazan and Rahat 2010;

Scarrow 1999). We report null f‌indings for the SPD, with

minimal differences in the factional identity of candi-

dates with spatial variation in selection processes, likely

duetocloserinter-factionco-operationandneedto

balance selections in multi-party electoral systems. In the

Democratic Party, we f‌ind that the nomination of pro-

gressives was better explained by district partisanship

rather than spatial variation in the inclusivity of primary

election participation, potentially due to the decentral-

ised selection process. More inclusive selection pro-

cesses did not align with higher numbers of progressive

candidates being selected in the SPD or Democratic

Party, suggesting that progressive demands for intra-

party democratisation are made, at least in part, out of

conviction rather than for electoral benef‌it. Methodo-

logically, we offer a qualitative approach linking can-

didate selection processes with factional allegiance of

candidates selected, replicable for other parties with

identif‌iable factions. Our f‌indings highlight the impor-

tance of the decentralisation dimension of candidate

selection, frequently overlooked by political scientists

and reform advocates alike.

We proceed as follows: f‌irst, we present the theo-

retical background which shapes our assumptions

about candidate selection, as well as details of the

framework that we follow. We then present our cases

and expand our theorizing about factions in these

parties. Next, we explain selection processes in each

party, and position selectorates along both dimensions.

Following this, we introduce our data and research

design. Finally, we present and discuss the results of

our empirical models.

Cowburn and Kerr 293